How many of these will survive if Hasbro decides they don’t want to be sold next to old-school games?

Gamergate has spread to tabletop gaming, sort of. DriveThruRPG has taken down a satirical card game based on Gamergate after a public complaint by Evil Hat Productions.

I like Evil Hat. I own Don’t Rest Your Head, it’s brilliant. I don’t use DriveThruRPG much (the last thing I remember buying from them is the Haiti Relief bundle), but they have the right to sell or not sell whatever they want.

But I also write satire, and I write OSR games. It’s always disappointing when a company decides that satire is beyond the pale. DriveThruRPG has no problem selling controversial or adult material: it includes, in its listings, Fuck For Satan (Lamentations of the Flame Princess), The Sex Presidents (Mongoose), and the Book of Erotic Fantasy (White Wolf).

For that matter, Evil Hat has no problem being sold next to such game titles. One would expect a game company called Evil Hat to be liberal about their shelfmates rather than prudish, as they are in the case of the Gamergate card game, so one can hope that this is a momentary aberration on Evil Hat’s evil part.

But there are other publishers with more family-friendly lines. Will DriveThruRPG follow through on their precedent if Wizards of the Coast decides they don’t want to be sold next to Satanic Sex books? DriveThruRPG carries a whole bunch of Wizards of the Coast games. They’re likely to be more affected by a WotC threat than an Evil Hat threat.

And what if Wizards or their owner, Hasbro, decides to return to their TSR-era stance on third-party products? If Wizards were to say that they don’t want to be sold next to OSR materials, would DriveThruRPG decide they don’t need to be selling Autarch, BRW Games, Goodman Games, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, or Troll Lord Games?

I was originally going to wait until they responded before writing this post. On December 6 I sent a message through their contact us form:

Please don’t get into the habit of censoring your games because of relatively innocuous political content. That’s a long hard road, as simple searches on your site for games about “sex”, “witches”, and “satan” will attest.

I received an immediate automated response,

Your request (#12652) has been received, and is being reviewed by our support staff.

We will be in contact with you soon.

Thank you for your business.

Three minutes later, I received this, which, if it wasn’t automated, was a very fast response:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us.

We are currently reviewing this product internally.

Thank you for being patient while we discuss this matter and investigate this situation thoroughly.

We appreciate your feedback and want to thank you for taking the time to submit your inquiry.

Thank you for your business and please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

[Name redacted]

Customer Service

However thoroughly they’ve investigated the situation, there’s been no further response to me, and I can’t find one online. Thinking I might have missed something, I followed through the link for request #12652, and was told “Request not found. You do not have access to request #12652. It may have been solved or deleted.”

Apparently it was deleted, as there is no mention of it under either “open” or “solved or closed” requests.

OneBookShelf has every right to control what they sell, even in response to other publishers’ threats. And we have every right to be worried when they do so.